Film Review: Ocean's Eleven (1960)

Film Review: Ocean's Eleven (1960) | Ecency

(source: tmdb.org)

The history of cinema knows many films that provided more fun to the cast and crew on set than for the audience in the cinema. One of the most legendary examples is Ocean’s Eleven, the 1960 action comedy directed by Lewis Milestone.

The plot is set in Las Vegas and begins when two friends and Second World War veterans—Danny Ocean (played by Frank Sinatra) and Jimmy Foster (played by Peter Lawford)—decide to rob five casinos. They gather nine more of their friends, with whom they served in the 82nd Airborne Division, and begin to plan a heist that would require military precision. The idea is to infiltrate the casinos either as entertainers or members of staff, cause a city-wide power blackout on New Year’s Eve, and use the confusion to collect money, which is going to be hidden in garbage bags. These are later collected by Josh Howard (played by Sammy Davis Jr.), who works as the city’s sanitation worker. The plan works despite Tony Bergdorf (played by Richard Conte), the gang’s electrician, dying of a heart attack during the heist. However, the gang’s activities catch the attention of Duke Santos (played by Cesar Romero), a former gangster who wants to take a cut of the loot for himself.

Viewed simply as a heist film, Ocean’s Eleven is average at best and not that different from many other heist films Hollywood and other cinema industries would produce in the 1960s. The large number of characters requires a long exposition that makes the first part of the film very slow and boring. Some members of the cast either overact, like Akim Tamiroff as the gang’s mentor, or are completely wasted, like Angie Dickinson. Even the exotic setting of Las Vegas, which was glamorous in the 1960s—although not as glamorous as it is today—isn’t put to proper use. The use of music numbers, on the other hand, makes this film difficult to take seriously. What ultimately makes Ocean’s Eleven watchable is Frank Sinatra, a singer who was at the time at the zenith of his popularity and who also brought his friends from the legendary Rat Pack (Davis, Lawford, Dean Martin and Joey Bishop) to the cast. They saw this film, shot on location in Las Vegas, as an excellent opportunity to mix work and play; they were either performing or partying in Las Vegas clubs at night while shooting the film by day. This resulted in a quite relaxed atmosphere on the set, with veteran director Lewis Milestone more or less relinquishing authority to Sinatra and his friends, who improvised many of their lines. Some of that relaxed atmosphere reflects on the screen, and Ocean’s Eleven ultimately works as feather-light entertainment that can be enjoyed even by viewers who aren’t fans of Ol' Blue Eyes and the Rat Pack. However, it is an effective twist at the end—partly forced by the producers’ need to follow the antiquated censorship rules of the MPAA Production Code—that results in one of the more memorable final scenes in 1960s cinema. Yet, even with such an improvement, it isn’t that surprising that four decades later Steven Soderbergh, with his Ocean’s Eleven, made one of the rare Hollywood remakes better than the original.

RATING: 5/10 (++)